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Trump and Second Amendment Solutions

I couldn’t believe the spectacle on TV last night, all those adult pundits “debating” whether Trump had meant what he said in the sense that he seemed to say it. Parsing, analyzing, weighing his word salad. As if there could be any question what he was insinuating. As if he was serious, in the way that he would be serious about choosing a fourth wife or a new tax shelter for Ivanka’s trust fund. He makes it up as he goes along. He seeks attention and adulation from wherever he can get it, and where he gets it the most these days is from the people who identify proudly as oppressed white Christian gun owners who are one insult away from shooting their “oppressors,” those oppressors being non-white, non-Christian, non-heterosexual urban-dwellers, and of course all those white race traitors with money and education who look down on them. Some of them (but not nearly so many as in days of yore) have a special animus for Jews.

This is America and we are not one country. Even if he’s reached his ceiling, Donald Trump’s rise is proof enough of that. The fact that 35 percent or so of whites are as alienated as they are is as damning as the fact that so many minorities are. Defeating Trump may postpone America’s day of reckoning, but it won’t begin to fix its problems.

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5 thoughts on “Trump and Second Amendment Solutions”

Unfortunately, what you said in your final paragraph is probably correct. In my anti-Birther campaign I have encountered a number of those 35% you speak about. That’s where the Birthers dwell. They believe Obama is a Muslim and a communist. They frequently call for President Obama and his supporters to be hanged for treason. They think George Soros and Saul Alinsky from the grave are directing a conspiracy on a daily basis. Those are the ones who believe if you say “black lives matter” you mean that white lives do not matter.

It’s funny and sickening at the same time to see people who should know better like Rudy Giuliani go on TV and lie their asses off that Trump was talking about “organizing second amendment supporters”. Anyone who has followed the far right has heard the phrase “second amendment solution” used many times and know that it refers to violence or revolution. At this point the humor is about gone though.

One thing not being discusses is that Trump’s base statement itself is a bald faced lie. Secretary Clinton has never once advocated abolishing the Second Amendment. Trump has conveniently taken the NRA ammosexual position that any mention of controlling military assault weapons means overturning the Second Amendment.

I wonder if we ever have been “one country”? Maybe we never have been “one country” and we are now reacting in the same manner as if Lincoln’s civil war never happened. This idea, however, falls on its face in light of the support claimed to exist in white, disenfranchised northern men and women. And quite frankly, I have no means of understanding the claims of Trump support voiced by my white professional upwardly mobile 60-ish neighbors. Can it all be understood as ABC?

The really telling part of the video is the reaction of the man and wife behind and to the left of Trump. You could see the man react as if to say “Wow, he really went there” and the wife is laughing. To people like that it’s no big deal to call for the assassination of someone whom they have been told for 25 years by the right wing media machine is an evil cartoon-like villain.

Of course he didn’t really mean it literally, as in “I hope some brave patriot does us the favor of killing this terrible woman and saving our country,” anymore than he “meant” for people to draw anti-Semitic inferences when he re-Tweeted Hillary in a Star of David. He uses these right wing tropes opportunistically, and up until now, he dominated most news cycles as a result. It was win win for him until it became lose lose.

I think neither Trump nor his people have figured out why his same shtick that worked in the Republican primary season isn’t working.

All he had to do to win the nomination is Tweet convince the Birther and conspiracy nut segments of the Republican party that he could hate with the best of them. This allowed him to establish a solid plurality of the party and drive the more moderate candidates out.

That left only Ted Cruz. Cruz is hated by the moderates and the party leaders. The Birther wing felt Cruz was ineligible due to his Canadian birth. That left Trump standing.

Trump was deluded into thinking the same playbook would work with the general electorate. It will not work. I don’t think he really cares though. Trump is not an adapter. He has one playbook. He is a one trick pony. He expects to bully and get his way and won’t listen to anyone.

I agree on the Star of David. I don’t think Trump was being anti-Semitic. However, I think he knew exactly what the Second Amendment reference was all about.